Why this war is so hated

The New Neo Posted on by

The war in Iraq is especially hated.

Of course, all wars are hated by most thoughtful people, since they involve bloodshed and suffering. And havoc.

It’s not for nothing that Shakespeare wrote in Julius Caesar: “Cry havoc, and let loose the dogs of war.” The word “havoc” has two meanings: widespread destruction, and disorder or chaos. Any war unleashes the possibility of either or both; they are part and parcel of the enterprise.

But I’m not talking primarily of that sort of generalized hatred of war, the type that’s shared by both sides and applies to all wars. No, there seems to be something special about the war in Iraq and its aftermath, the reconstruction, which seems to have aroused a level of ire unprecedented in my lifetime (a lifetime that’s included quite a few wars, including another exceptionally controversial one, Vietnam).

So I’ve been wondering about the origins of the extremity and intensity of the hatred. After all, it’s not as though this is a war with especially high casualties on either side, at least as wars go; that first element of the definition of havoc–widespread destruction–has not occurred, not even in Iraq.

And it’s not as though Saddam Hussein, whose regime was the original target of the war, is anybody’s hero outside of Iraq–and even in Iraq his supporters were/are limited, although previously powerful and presently out for blood. So no, even most of those who hate this war find it difficult to get worked up into a lather of sympathy for Saddam, and they often remember to begin war critiques with the disclaimer: “Of course, Saddam was bad, but…”.

Nor is there a draft. So in this country–and in all the other coalition members, as far as I know–no one’s life is on the line who hasn’t volunteered for that solemn responsibility. In Vietnam, in contrast, there’s no question that the draft gave enormous fuel to the protest fire. Self-interest being what it is, and human beings being what they are, that’s understandable.

So, what’s going on here? I’ve come up with a numbers of theories. The first, of course, is the enormous enmity people feel for Bush personally (I’ve written on the subject here, and Dr. Sanity has written a great deal more extensively about it here.) This hatred–and “hatred” is almost not a strong enough word for it–predated the war, of course, so the war has not caused it. Hatred for Bush is no small part of the hatred of the war itself; the two work in a sort of synergy. But by itself it doesn’t appear to account for the degree to which this war is hated.

Nor do I think hatred of this war stems mainly from the failure to find WMDs, although that likewise contributes. Once again, the hatred of this war predated that failure, so it can’t be caused by it.

So, what’s going on? I think there truly is something qualitatively different about this war that contributes greatly. Perhaps many things.

The war in Iraq was characterized with a certain audacity in its genesis. The reasons behind it, although they were explained, were complex and multiple. Some of them seemed merely “technical”–violations of UN resolutions and the ceasefire of the Gulf War, and failure to cooperate with inspectors, are unusual (perhaps unprecedented?) reasons to attack a nation. Even though the war was described as defensive–including defensive of the UN’s authority, which somehow seems ironic–it is very hard for most people to see it as defensive. This is partly because the possibility of weapons of mass destruction in the hands of a third-world nation that might give them to terrorists is a relatively new one, difficult to credit and to wrap the mind around (and the failure to find WMDs in Iraq feeds into this difficulty).

But it is especially hard for many to credit the “self-defense” or “defense of the neighbors of Iraq” argument for the war because the US is a strong and powerful nation, especially militarily, and Iraq, although strong for a third-world country (as compared to, for example, Haiti), was no match for it. So the notion of bullying comes into play in many people’s minds as an almost kneejerk reaction to the disparity, without a focus on the fact that Saddam was actually the quintessential bully.

But Saddam’s bullying–and “bullying” is way too weak a word for it; better to call it “tyrannical systematic mass murder and the installation of a totalitarian fear state”–was simply not on the radar screen of most people in the West. Out of sight, out of mind, for the most part. I’m not being especially critical of this; it’s something we all do in order to go about our lives without the constant awareness of all the suffering on earth about which we can do nothing. But the consequence of this tuning out of the hardship of others it that it makes it easy for many people to forget that earlier carnage, and to argue their case as though the suffering just began, sprung full-blown from the head of Bush and only as a consequence of “his” war.

This war and its aftermath also have also been unusually long, at least by modern standards. No, the war’s not even remotely up there with Vietnam in that regard. But compared to the Gulf War, for example, it’s extremely long and complex. That’s mostly because it involves a reconstruction, always a long and difficult project. In fact, if just the original invasion and battles with Saddam’s official armies are considered, the war was remarkably, almost freakishly, short. But we are all correct to consider those skirmishes just the beginning; the real war is the reconstruction.

That fact, combined with modern-day impatience, leads to some of the rage. We’ve lost sight of how difficult such a thing is; we want immediate solutions and clean and simple endings. And of course those things would be wonderful. But they are unrealisitic. And many believe that the Bush administration expected those things as well; witness the focus on Ken Adelman’s “cakewalk” remark (I discussed that remark and its meaning and context here).

But even though Bush actually made many prewar comments on how difficult the tasks of this war would be does not change the fact that the actual reconstruction has been more difficult than most people (including, I believe, most in the administration) expected. I discuss these issues here, and I urge you, if interested, to read what I’ve said, so I don’t have to reinvent the wheel.

Underlying all of this, I believe, is the fact that in some ways this war is sui generis. The invasion of a smaller, weaker country by a larger, stronger one is a familiar sight in history, of course. But previously (absent a provoking attack on the stronger by the weaker) the reason for the attack tends to have been that the larger nation was up to no good. That is, that the invasion was motivated by an exploitative impulse to plunder.

Ancient history is full of such examples, and it’s also much of the modern story of imperialism. So that’s the template: exploitation. The fact that one of the motives for this war–although certainly not the sole factor–was the liberation of the Iraqi people is a statement greeted with derision by so many partly because it isn’t something with which we’ve previously had a great deal of experience. Therefore it’s something we have reason to be cynical about.

But it is nevertheless the truth, in my opinion–part of the reason this war was fought was said liberation. But in this case the critics are at least partly correct, in that the motive for wanting to liberate the Iraqi people has not been solely altruistic. There’s something in it for us, of course.

That’s one of the reasons the dread neocons were in favor of this war: the liberation of the Iraqi people was felt to have been in our own interests. As such, however, it would be a win-win situation: the people’s liberation would also have been in their own interests, as well as ours. And some of the anger of war opponents stems from a difficulty in seeing that self-interest and altruistic impulses are not necessarily in conflict, but sometimes (as in this case, if all goes well) can go hand in hand.

That leaves us with another question: has all gone well? Of course, the jury is out on that so far. And the answer also depends on one’s definition of “gone well,” which, in turn, depends on what one is comparing Iraq’s present state to–Switzerland? Or prewar Saddam’s Iraq? Or, especially, to what would have happened had Saddam stayed in power?

The answer also depends on how patient one is. I think the Iraqi people have demonstrated more patience than many in the West have. Of course, the “insurgents” have quite a bit of patience, too. The patience of Iraqis on both sides is understandable, because they’ve been through a lot more than most Westerners have, and have a lot more to lose. But, paradoxically, whether or not the patience of the freedom- and peace-loving elements of the Iraqi people will be rewarded depends in part on our having patience. And we in the modern West are not known for our patience.

[I may opine some more on this tomorrow; I’ve got enough material for a Part II. We’ll see).

That lone Jewish Iranian representative: the history of religious minorities in Iran

The New Neo Posted on by

My original post about the (now pretty much debunked) report of an Islamic dress code law for minorities quoted that report as stating that the clothing designations were to apply to Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians in Iran.

That got me wondering about the histories of those three minorities in Persia, now Iran. So I started by looking up the history of Jews in Persia, and discovered this article, which sheds quite a bit of light on the history of all those minority groups, including their recent representation in Iran’s legislature. I have no reason to doubt the information in it, but it’s best to issue a caveat that all the following information is based on that one article from something called the “Iran Chamber Society,” which (at least according to its own self-description) appears to be a non-affiliated and nonpolitical group dedicated to learning about Iranian/Persian history and culture.

I’m sure books have been written on the subject, and this is only a short article, but the gist of the history is that yes indeed, these three communities have ancient and deep roots in Persia. They had all experienced an unusual amount of religious freedom for the times until the Moslem conquest of Persia in the seventh century. At that point, all members of polytheistic and pagan religions were given the choice to convert or die, but Jews and Christians, as “people of the book,” were given second-class citizen dhimmi status under reigning sharia law (made to pay poll taxes, prohibited from friendship and intermarriage with Moslems, etc.). Zoroastrians were later included in this category, interestingly enough.

Putting the whole thing in context, if one compares dhimmi status to the previous pre-Moslem-conquest religious freedom in the area, it was indeed a restriction. But if one compares it to the status of Jews in Europe at the time, for example, for the most part dhimmi status seems like an advance. Application of the more stringent discriminations varied over time according to the whim and personalities of the various rulers of Persia.

There were massacres or these minority groups as well–also not unheard of in Europe, to say the least. But more recently, especially by the turn of the nineteenth into the twentieth century, the secularization movement swept through Persia/Iran and owed some of its success to the activities of members of these minority groups. In 1907 their efforts bore fruit–except for the Bahais, who were still excluded–citizenship there was now based on nationality and not religion, and the Majlis (the legislature) was secularized and no longer solely Islamic.

Here’s the part that relates, interestingly enough, directly to the story that began this whole quest for me. You may recall that one of the people denying the rumor was the sole Jewish representative to the Iranian legislature. Many–including myself–were wondering about this man: how did he get elected? Who was he?

It turns out that the 1907 law establishing the national Majlis ordered that there be representatives of each religious minority: one for each major religion. In fact, the way it worked was that Jews, Christians and Zoroastrians could participate by voting in the election of their respective single representatives, but not in the selection of any other members of the legislature. It was a strictly segregated vote for a very limited representation (Jews were to vote only for the single Jew, Christians for the single Christian, and Zoroastrians for the single Zoroastrian), but it was a slight advance over what had gone before.

When the Shah came to power he furthered religious tolerance in the country and even ignored the ban on non-Shiite Moslems in government. During his regime there were not only some non-Moslems in government; even some members of the previously most reviled group, the Bahais, served. This all ended with the 1979 Islamic revolution, which restored the rule of sharia law.

At present, the old 1907 rule is in force, allowing one representative each from the Jewish, Christian, and Zoroastrian populations of Iran. The article is mum on the topic of how they are elected; my best guess would be that the old way is followed on that, as well, and that each minority group votes only for its one representative and no others.

So that is apparently the story of how Maurice Motammed came to be the lone Jewish representative in Iran’s Islamic parliament.

Update: the dress code rumor

The New Neo Posted on by

Via Dr. Zin of Regime Change Iran, here’s an update on the Iranian dress code story, from the Canadian newspaper that originally published it.

The gist of the most recent information seems to be this:

Sam Kermanian, of the U.S.-based Iranian-American Jewish Federation, said in an interview from Los Angeles that he had contacted members of the Jewish community in Iran ”” including the lone Jewish member of the Iranian parliament ”” and they denied any such measure was in place.

Mr. Kermanian said the subject of “what to do with religious minorities” came up during debates leading up to the passing of the dress code law.

“It is possible that some ideas might have been thrown around,” he said. “But to the best of my knowledge the final version of the law does not demand any identifying marks by the religious minority groups.”

Ali Reza Nourizadeh, an Iranian commentator on political affairs in London, suggested that the requirements for badges or insignia for religious minorities was part of a “secondary motion” introduced in parliament, addressing the changes specific to the attire of people of various religious backgrounds.

Mr. Nourizadeh said that motion was very minor and was far from being passed into law.

That account could not be confirmed.

So far, the whole thing seems to be on the order of a rumor that was allowed to pass muster and be published in Toronto’s National Post, as well as to be given voice by Amir Taheri. I have a small wish (or maybe it’s not so small): that newspapers, both on the left and the right and in the middle, do more fact and source checking before they publish the news that we all rely on.

Roger Simon has further thoughts on the matter.

[ADDENDUM: Taheri, one of the original disseminators of the rumor, has put out a further statement.]

Revolutionaries and regret: Eleni

The New Neo Posted on by

In my post on the unfortunate tendency of revolutions to devour their own, Elmondohummus made the following comment:

Such movements, such revolutions, tend not to be the wonderfully exciting, meaningful, free places that participants imagine, but coldhearted, calculating monoliths of purpose unimagined by the individual participants caught up in the heady romance of the moment…But to be openly abused, jailed, even executed… Such a betrayal… yet, time and time again, you read of people in Ghotbzadeh’s shoes, true believers chewed up and spit out by the momentum of the movement, a mere commodity to be used to the movement’s own ends.

Most revolutions do tend to turn on their own in time—and often not all that much time. But there’s a further aspect of it I want to discuss here, and that is this: when revolutions change into something unforeseen by their original—sometimes starry-eyed, idealistic, and naive—proponents, those early advocates often turn into opponents of the very revolution they launched. Their efforts to undo what they’ve unleashed are usually futile. That is apparently what may have happened to the sardonic Ghotbzadeh, who did not have the last laugh, after all.

Back in 1983 I read Eleni, Nicholas Gage’s testament to his mother’s life and a depiction of her execution by Communists during the Greek Civil War in the 40s. It’s an extraordinary book for many reasons, and its power is difficult to describe. It’s long and complex, with so many characters that, halfway through, I wished I’d kept a chart with all the names and familial relations graphed, because every now and then I got lost in the maze. But, even though at the time I was the exhausted mother of a young child, it was so compelling that I exhausted myself still further by staying up night after night until I’d finished it.

It’s one of those books where you know the ending right at the beginning–Gage comes right out with it in the introductory chapter. But that doesn’t diminish the story any more than knowing the plot of a Shakespearean play takes away from the experience of seeing it again. Gage’s mother Eleni is a true heroine, a woman of epic courage and love (as well as great intelligence, despite her lack of formal education). I submit that the book cannot be read by any feeling person without its pages becoming wet with tears.

But in the days after I read Eleni, I realized on reflection that Gage tells another story in addition to his gripping personal story. He attempts to describe the Greek Civil War itself. In this, by the way, he has drawn some fire from those who believe he hasn’t given the Communist guerillas their due.

But when I read Gage’s book I actually thought his portrait of said Communists was somewhat sympathetic. It’s hard to forget his description of them; one in particular was the local schoolteacher, initially a gentle idealist, as I recall. The book delineates, step by careful step, how over the course of time these people compromised and hardened until they were all but unrecognizable, their dreams soured and their cause utterly transformed into something they wouldn’t have recognized (or supported) at the outset. To me, that was a twin tragedy.

The two brothers, Prokopi and Spiro Skevis, the locals who, in Gage’s words, “sowed the seeds of Communism” in Lia, his home village, both were killed in battle rather than at the hands of their own. But Gage writes that, after the execution of his mother and four other villagers:

Spiro Skevis’ success in bringing Communism to the Mourgana villages had turned to ashes in his mouth. The execution in Lia of his five fellow villagers tormented him. A captain in his battalion later told me how, shortly after the retreat from the Mourgana, Spiro went out of control and tried to kill one of the chief aides [to the judge in the trial that led to Gage’s mother’s execution], drawing a gun on him and screaming that the man was a criminal, a murderer of women. Other guerillas jumped Spiro before he could pull the trigger. He went to the grave tormented by the perversion of the movement that he and Prokopi had begun with such high intentions.

I don’t think Spiro would be alone among revolutionaries in having such regrets. Ghotbzadeh, Robespierre, Trotsky, and the rest—what were they all thinking in their last moments?

New dress code may go into effect in Iran

The New Neo Posted on by

Iran may be about to revive an old custom. A law passed by the Iranian parliament needs only the approval of “Supreme Guide” Ali Khamenehi to become practice.

It actually was passed two years ago, but languished until recently “revived at the behest of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.” What a surprise.

Here’s the gist of it:

Iran’s roughly 25,000 Jews would have to sew a yellow strip of cloth on the front of their clothes, while Christians would wear red badges and Zoroastrians would be forced to wear blue cloth.

Oh well, there are so few of them left in Iran, anyway. But it wasn’t always that way.

See this, this, and this.

[NOTE: Allahpundit cautions that the story may not be true.

And here’s more on the confusion.

Still more evidence that this is likely to be false.]

Revolutions devouring their own

The New Neo Posted on by

In the Atlantic article I discussed yesterday, a name on the first page caught my eye: Sadegh Ghotbzadeh, the Iranian foreign minister at the time of the hostage crisis.

Suddenly, although I hadn’t thought of him in decades, the memory came back. Ghotbzadeh! I recall his sardonic, jaded, man-of-the-world expression—a strange combination of arrogance and weariness. As the spokesperson for the regime, he was featured often on TV (I think on the nascent “Nightline,” then entitled “America Held Hostage”). As a visible and familiar figure, he became somewhat of a focus for my frustration and annoyance with the entire situation. Something about him seemed hollow, although he was clearly intelligent and articulate.

As events unfolded, it turned out that Ghotbzadeh was one of those cautionary figures, a man who was instrumental in planning a revolution that then got away from him and proceeded to devour him in the process. Like Robespierre, Danton, and Desmoulins; like Trotsky and so many other engineers of the Russian revolution who were slaughtered in the great purges; authors of violent revolutions often come to violent ends at the hands of their violent former comrades.

Thus it was with Ghotbzadeh. Here he is:

Ghotbzadeh was close to the Ayatollah Khomeini while both were in exile in Paris, and became one of his right-hand men back home in the early days of the revolution. He seems to have been motivated most strongly by hatred of the Shah’s regime. But, paradoxically, his role in the hostage crisis was as a relative moderate (accent on the “relative;” moderate in comparison to what?). He seemed to be working for a diplomatic solution, and lost favor with the Iranian powers that be in the process.

Former hostage and Ambassador at the time, Bruce Laingen, has this to say about Ghotbzadeh:

I didn’t like him at the outset for the role he played as Foreign Minister, but I sensed as time went on over those months, that he came to the conclusion, himself, fairly early, that this hostage business was counterproductive to the revolution and that it needed to be ended. I think he genuinely wanted to end it and was prepared to make some concessions to do that. And he stuck his neck out to do that. He showed some guts.

It all unraveled rather quickly:

Ghotbzadeh finally resigned in 1980 over the deadlock in negotiations. That year, after he was arrested and briefly detained after criticizing the ruling Islamic Republican Party, he retired from public life. In 1982 he was arrested on charges of plotting against the regime. Although he denied any conspiracy to take Khomeini’s life, he apparently admitted complicity with Ayatollah Mohammad Kazem Shariat-Madari in a plot to overthrow the government. Ghotbzadeh was convicted in August 1982 and executed the following month.

Did he really plan to end the Khomeini reign, and, if so, with what was he planning to replace it? Or were the charges trumped up, and was he forced to confess to crimes he didn’t commit? At the time, I remember being astounded at the news of his startling reversal of fortune and allegiance; it was quite a switch from disliking him to feeling some sympathy for the man.

Guillotining having gone out of style, Ghotbzadeh was shot by a firing squad shortly after his trial. The revolution had eaten another of its own.

But not everyone connected with the early days of the revolution has met such a fate. Others connected with the hostage crisis have prospered. It’s unclear whether or not the current Iranian President, our good friend Ahmadinejad, was one of those “student” hostage-takers, although several former hostages have identified him as such. But there’s very little doubt about the identity of another former hostage-taker who’s riding high at present: Hussein Sheikholeslam, recently an Iranian diplomat and legislator.

Why do I mention Sheikholeslam? Only because I came across an interesting fact about him, an indication of the sort of cross-fertilization process that seems to have been at work in the revolutions of the 60s/70s. Sheikholeslam may not have been an actual student at the time of the hostage-taking in Iran. But whether or not Sheikholeslam was a student at that point, he certainly had been a student earlier—at UC Berkeley, where he learned a thing or two:

UC Berkeley gained a reputation as a center of student anti-war protest during the 1960s and 1970s. During that tempestuous period, an Iranian student named Hussein Sheikh-ol-eslam attended Cal. He became fluent in English. He also absorbed the demonstrations criticizing American imperialism in Vietnam and other nations.

After Hussein returned to Iran, writes Mark Bowden in his new book, “Guests of the Ayatollah,” his anti-Americanism planted deep roots in his Islamic religion. In late 1979, the tree connected to those roots bore ugly fruit.

The student protests of the 60s didn’t actually revolutionize much in the directly political and traditionally revolutionary (i.e. a sudden overthrow of the existing government) sense in the US. The “revolution” they began here took a cultural form, with resultant political results (and intent). But in Iran, students who had learned the anti-American and propaganda lessons of the 60s used them later to great (and more instant) effect. Some forget that the 60s didn’t just happen in this country; the protests occurred in Europe as well.

Khomeini spent some of his exile in France, but I was surprised to learn (from Wikipedia, so this could be taken with a grain of salt) that the French were not necessarily simpatico to him during his rather short sojourn there:

In 1963, [Khomeini] publicly denounced the government of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. He was thereby imprisoned for 8 months, and upon his release in 1964, he made a similar denunciation of the United States. This led to his forced exile out of Iran. He initially went to Turkey but was later allowed to move to Iraq, where he stayed until being forced to leave in 1978, after then-Vice President Saddam Hussein forced him out…after which he went to Neauphle-le-Ché¢teau in France. According to Alexandre de Marenches (then head of the French secret services), France suggested to the Shah that they could “arrange for Khomeini to have a fatal accident”; the Shah declined the assassination offer, arguing that this would make him a martyr.

[NOTE: My post about Azar Nafisi, author of Reading Lolita in Tehran, is relevant here. Nafisi, an Iranian national, likewise fell in with other radical Iranian students while studying in this country. Then, when she returned to Iran, she saw quite a few of those former associates imprisoned—and in some cases executed—by their former comrades-in-arms.]

Not a rumor: McCartneys separate

The New Neo Posted on by

It was no rumor, after all (or rather, no mere rumor). The McCartneys have split.

The speculation so far seems to revolve around the money angle: “McCartney Divorce Could Be Biggest in UK History.”

And, once again, the photo of Paul accompanying the article is quite cruel. Shall I be cruel and reproduce it? Oh, okay; but only as an object lesson in a point I tried to make yesterday–do not, especially as you get older, allow photographs to be taken from below chin level:


Just to refresh your memory, here’s Paul from a similar angle in happier days:


Reports are that the divorce is that somewhat rara avis, an amicable one. Sometimes divorces can be exactly that, and I hope this one ends up fitting the description by the time it’s over. There’s a young child involved, for starters.

There are also older children involved–or perhaps the word “offspring” would be more appropriate; they’re certainly not kids–who are reported to have disliked Heather from the start.

I don’t claim to have any special knowledge of the inner workings of the McCartney marriage–I barely know anything about its outer workings. But my guess is that, after a marriage as long and extraordinarily harmonious as McCartney’s first one is reported to have been, change can come hard.

And of course, even though Paul is a fairly well-preserved almost-sixty-four, the age difference between Paul and Heather is profound. She’s thirty-eight, which makes her approximately half his age and, more importantly, about the age of his children.

Remarriages involving stepchildren, small or grown up, can have extra difficulties. It stands to reason, especially when the children’s loyalty to a first spouse is profound, which is often (and understandably so) the case. One would think that if the children are grown up the path is eased (and this is ordinarily very true), but having a stepparent of one’s own age is a special case that can be experienced as unbalancing.

Of course, it’s all sheer speculation on my part as to the factors that may have contributed to the breakup. The only ones who know the true story of a marriage are the participants, and much of the time even they don’t know a whole lot. The recent divorce rate, often quoted as one in two, actually isn’t quite that high, but it’s high enough, with the US leading at 44% and the UK following close on its heels. So perhaps Paul is simply typical of our times: he’s 1 for 2 so far.

A debacle, indeed: revisiting the Iran embassy hostage rescue attempt

The New Neo Posted on by

This piece from the Atlantic Monthly Online, “The Desert One Debacle,” about the Carter administration’s attempt to rescue the embassy hostages in Iran in 1980, is a sobering read.

I vaguely remember the incident–just one in a long line of frustrations connected with that sorry spectacle. But the details–which I’d never read before–are a case of “whatever could go wrong, did go wrong;” from vicious sandstorms, to the utterly improbable coincidence of the planes’ initially encountering a truck and a civilian passenger bus as they landed in the desert, to a fatal airplane crash. Debacle, indeed; the planes never even came near Tehran.

Perhaps it’s a good thing they didn’t. From the evidence in the piece, the loss of life would likely have been even greater had they done so. It’s very difficult to believe that this mission ever had any chance of succeeding. Not only was the weather problem in the desert underestimated, and the assault force relatively small (one hundred thirty two men maximum, with some planes expected to encounter technical difficulties and drop out), but here was the game plan for controlling crowds around the embassy:

Another presidential directive concerned the use of nonlethal riot-control agents. Given that the shah’s occasionally violent riot control during the revolution was now Exhibit A in Iran’s human-rights case against the former regime and America, Carter wanted to avoid killing Iranians, so he had insisted that if a hostile crowd formed during the raid, Delta should attempt to control it without shooting people. Burruss considered this ridiculous. He and his men were going to assault a guarded compound in the middle of a city of more than 5 million people, most of them presumed to be aggressively hostile. It was unbelievably risky; everyone on the mission knew there was a very good chance they would not get home alive. Wade Ishmoto, a Delta captain who worked with the unit’s intelligence division, had joked, “The only difference between this and the Alamo is that Davy Crockett didn’t have to fight his way in.”

At any rate, it didn’t come to that. After flying through vicious sandstorms, landing in the desert, and encountering a Mercedes passenger bus filled with ordinary Iranians (who were promptly searched by the Americans and prepared to be flown out of Iran for the duration of the mission), the rescue attempt was aborted because too many aircraft had been rendered inoperative.

Then, as the evacuation of the planes was underway, one of the helicopters crashed into a transport plane on the ground, causing a conflagration and the death of eight members of the assault force. From the description of the scene, it’s a wonder the death toll wasn’t higher.

Reading about the hostage crisis brings back gut-wrenchingly bad memories: the endless negotiating, the arrogant posturing of the hostage-takers, the seeming impotence of our government. It’s easy to recall that it was long; at the time, it seemed nearly endless, but the actual length was astounding: 444 days. The incident was one of the reasons Carter lost the Presidency (and rightly so), suffering the final ignominy of the hostages’ release on Ronald Reagan’s Inauguration Day.

In retrospect–and perhaps even at the time–the entire hostage crisis was a debacle, not just the rescue attempt. The consensus is that Carter’s mishandling of the situation caused the US to be perceived as weak and vulnerable.

This recent Salon article contains a telling vignette on the subject, from the Iran of 2004:

So it was that I stood impatiently before the window to check out while the [hotel] receptionist took his sweet time to retrieve my American passport from the cubby behind him. He held it for a long, strange moment before he slid it my way. Wistfully, he said: “How I wish I had a passport like that.” Off we were, talking about the election. The receptionist hoped President George W. Bush would defeat Sen. John Kerry. He hated the Democrats, he professed. It wasn’t my first encounter with this Iranian enthusiasm for the Republican Party, as unfathomable as it was widespread. Under the Republican President Dwight Eisenhower, after all, the United States toppled Iran’s popular nationalist prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, in 1953, consolidating power in the hands of the brutal and despised shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. Under the Democratic President Bill Clinton, the United States finally apologized for engineering those events. I asked the receptionist to explain. “Jimmy Carter,” he replied with disgust. “He could have stopped this Islamic Revolution, and he didn’t.” When it comes to Iran, where revolutionaries identified Carter with every bad turn the United States had ever visited on their or any other third-world country, and where Americans would come to associate him with haplessness and defeat, somehow everything the president from Plains, Ga., did would always be wrong. His presidency, already a fragile vessel, shattered on the shoals of the Iranian hostage crisis — those 444 days at the end of his single term when the staff of the American embassy in Tehran was held captive by militant students. From then on, he would forever be linked in the American mind with the humiliation of seeing one’s countrymen blindfolded, helpless, surrounded by angry mobs of Shiites — believers in a religion most Americans only dimly apprehended, revolutionaries who hated the United States for having supported a regime most Americans were barely conscious existed. And now, 26 years later, this Iranian hotel worker in a single gesture renounced his country’s revolution and laid it at the feet of the very president whose likeness Iranian revolutionaries burned in effigy as they massed outside the seized embassy compound.

“Will you still need me, will you still feed me, when I’m sixty-four?” Jury still out on that one

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s an ugly rumor, I know, and I shouldn’t repeat ugly rumors.

But just this once, I will: Paul McCartney and his wife Heather might be splitsville (the photo accompanying that link, by the way, is proof that after a certain age–or perhaps at any age–you should avoid having a photo taken from a low perspective. Trust me on that one).

So ladies, if you were a “Paul girl” such as yours truly, there is still hope. Not a whole lot of hope, but then again, there never was a whole lot, was there? The odds were always against us. And although even Sir Paul himself is looking a trifle raggedy lately, only those among us without sin should cast the first stone.

But it’s the timing of the story–if true–that impresses me. Because it turns out that today Paul is exactly one month short of his sixty-fourth birthday!

So perhaps that song was prescient, after all, in its uncertainty (although the line, “you’ll be older too” doesn’t seem to apply in Heather’s case):

When I get older losing my hair
Many years from now
Will you still be sending me a valentine
Birthday greetings, bottle of wine?
If I’d been out till quarter to three
Would you lock the door?
Will you still need me, will you still feed me
When I’m sixty-four?

You’ll be older too
And if you say the word
I could stay with you

I could be handy, mending a fuse
When your lights have gone
You can knit a sweater by the fireside
Sunday mornings go for a ride
Doing the garden, digging the weeds
Who could ask for more?
Will you still need me, will you still feed me
When I’m sixty-four?

Every summer we can rent a cottage in the Isle of Wight
If it’s not too dear
We shall scrimp and save
Grandchildren on your knee
Vera, Chuck & Dave

Send me a postcard, drop me a line
Stating point of view
Indicate precisely what you mean to say
Yours sincerely, wasting away
Give me your answer, fill in a form
Mine for evermore
Will you still need me, will you still feed me
When I’m sixty-four?
Ho!

Apres le deluge

The New Neo Posted on by

Well, we’ve had a week–or is it two?–of almost unending rain. But today, sun!

Here’s that same view outside the window of my study. You can see the changes; two weeks ago:

vs. today:

The birch tree is almost fully leafed out, hiding the evergreens that used to dominate.

Floods in New England: weather, climate, and change

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s a commonplace quip in New England that if you don’t like the weather, just wait five minutes. In other words, our weather is very changeable. Very.

Another quip is that there are two seasons in New England, winter and the Fourth of July. In other words, winter’s long and cold, and summer fleeting. Very.

Right now most of New England is in the midst of torrential rains and swollen rivers, record-setting within the last seventy years or so but not unprecedented. First we had a spring drought, and the initial rain was welcomed, but now it’s “Rain, Rain, Go Away” in earnest.

Schools are closed, basements are flooded, roads are damaged, and it’s still raining. My house is on a hill, and everything’s still dry inside, but I hear bitter complaints all around.

A friend sent these photos from an apartment complex in New Hampshire, one of those old converted mills that are ordinarily so picturesque.


Those windows you’re looking at with the water close to rushing into them are on the first floor, and the apartments they’re attached to have been evacuated.

When this sort of weather happens, people–being people–search for explanations. Global warming is often blamed for all the perturbations we’ve experienced lately, and for all I (or anyone) knows it may indeed be so.

But I think we often forget how constant change in weather has been. That New England saying refers only to short term day-by-day and hour-to-hour fluctuations. We cling to the illusion–and it’s just that, an illusion–that weather in general is stable over time, when in fact the opposite is actually true.

Our lifetimes are short enough that we don’t perceive these fluctuations in climate (“weather” becomes “climate” when we speak of the long term), but scientists know they exist and theorize as to their cause. There have been many; the glaciation of the ice ages are among the most well-known and dramatic. But we don’t have to go back that far in time to get an idea of the scope of climactic change; more recently there was the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age.

Here’s a small glimpse of some of the features of these climactic events, to give an idea of the relative speed with which the climate changed in those days, even before the massive burning of fossil fuel:

[The Medieval Warm Period lasted] from about 1000 to 1300 AD. As with the Little Ice Age, its timing and effects varied from region to region, and many experts doubt that the Medieval Warm Period was a truly global phenomenon. In East Asia, for example, temperatures were cooler.

Europe, though, enjoyed an undeniably balmy climate during the early medieval period. Agriculture flourished farther north and at higher elevations on mountains than is possible even in today’s warmish climate, and harvests generally were good.

Farmers raised wine grapes in England 300 miles north of present limits, and in what now are icebound parts of Greenland, Norse settlers grazed sheep and dairy cattle. In his book Climate History and Modern Man, H.H. Lamb noted that the great burst of cathedral-building and population expansion in medieval Europe coincided with the peak of the Medieval Warm Period.

By about 1400, the climate had cooled to temperatures comparable to today. Over the next century or two, the world would cool still further, bringing on the Little Ice Age.

…Some mark its inception as early as the 1200s, others view the Little Ice Age “proper” as beginning around 1450 or even later.

Disagreements arise because the phenomenon was not simply a giant cold snap. The cooling trend began at different times in different parts of the world and often was interrupted by periods of relative warmth.

All agree, however, that it lasted for centuries, and that the world began emerging from its grip between 1850 and 1900….

That’s recent; very recent indeed. Long before that, descendents of those who’d settled in Greenland in a warmer era had all died, and Iceland’s population was decimated. And, as an ex-New Yorker, I find this word picture of the Little Ice Age in that city something to marvel at:

In the fledgling United States, New York harbor froze over in winter, allowing people to walk from Manhattan to Staten Island.

As a child, such things fascinated me, in particular the ebb and flow of the ice ages themselves. I spent hours poring over a series of maps in the World Book Encyclopedia purporting to show the extent of different glaciations, as well as the changing shapes of the continents.

The idea that the coastline that seemed so immutable to me was only this way for a long moment in time, that all was flux, that over unimaginable aeons the very shape of the ground beneath us had altered immeasurably, that seas had appeared where mountains had been, and vice versa–all of this filled me with a sense I can only describe as wonder. That the world was far stranger than I could ever imagine, and in ways I could never understand, seemed just about right.

[NOTE: Speaking of change, here, for your viewing pleasure, are some animated drawings of the movements of the continents over time.]

Blogger burnout: it’s the end of the beginning

The New Neo Posted on by

There’s an interesting wave of fatigue running through the blogosphere. A lot of people are writing about it: The Anchoress is taking time off from politics, although not from blogging; Shrinkwrapped offers keen insight; Austin Bay opines, and Belmont Club weighs in with his trademark deep reflection.

The consensus is that a frustrating frustration is abroad in the land, related to the fact that the “easier” parts of this struggle have ended or are ending. Not that any of it has been easy, but Afghanistan and al Qaeda, and even to some extent Iraq, were clearer targets and tasks than the ones that lie ahead.

Still, they’ve been difficult, and are not clearly over yet, and people are tired. Tired of the struggle, tired of the bloodshed, and in some way tired most of all of the endless haranguing and vicious infighting here in the US.

But now we’re facing even tougher problems. As Austin Bay says:

Al Qaeda is being defeated”“ it’s not dead but it’s on its way to defeat. Even Al Qaeda’s latest rants reflect an awareness that their great gambit has failed…There is also a growing awareness that Iraq’s long slog may well result in the emergence of a new, more open political system in the Muslim Middle East. It’s still going to take a couple of years for this to be evident ”“and the worst defeatists and naysayers will either go to their graves denying it”“ but all of the indicators are there…Iran’s mullahs are demonstrating once again the limitations of UN multi-lateralism”“ sharp minds on the left and right recognize this. A lot of people staked their hopes for peace and a better future on UN multilateralism. The Iranian situation also illustrates the limits of US unilateralism ”” how many times can the world’s superpower go it alone?…

I think Iran is indeed one of the biggest causes of blogger fatigue, combined with our lack of agreement on the seriousness of the problem–if we can’t agree on the vicious intent and dangerousness of the Iranian leadership, what can we agree on?

Iran is a topic I’ve tried to wrap my mind around many times, and still it looms, unresolved and seemingly–perhaps–unresolvable. All approaches seem potentially either catastrophic or ineffectual, or both. So fatigue is an understandable reaction; the mind tends to shut down.

For me, personally, I think I faced something of this way back on 9/11, strangely enough. Not the details, of course; I couldn’t possibly have foreseen them. But it came to me that day that we were in something that would be very long and extraordinarily difficult. Here were my thoughts, from my “A mind is a difficult thing to change” series:

[On September 11, 2001], I went to the ocean and sat on the rocks. It was the loveliest day imaginable. I had been alive for over fifty years at the time, and I cannot recall weather and a sky quite like that before. It added to the utter unreality of the day and my feelings. The sky was so blue as to be almost piercing, with a clarity and sharpness that seemed other-worldly. It made it feel as though the heavens themselves were speaking to us; but what were they saying?

All this clarity and purity was enhanced by the fact that there wasn’t an airplane in the sky. There were boats of all types on the bluest of oceans, the sun beamed down and made the waves sparkle, and it all seemed to have a preciousness and a beauty that came with something that might soon be irretrievably lost…

Even on that very first day, as I sat on the rocks overlooking the beautiful ocean that I loved so much, I thought we had entered a new era, one which would probably go on for most of my lifetime however much longer I might live. The fight would be long and hard, and there would be many many deaths before it was over. Perhaps it would result in the end of civilization as we knew it–yes, my thoughts went that far on that day. This war would encompass most of the globe. I had no idea how it would work out, but I knew that we were in for the fight of our lives.

The legal actions of the past–the puny trial after the first World Trade Center attack, for example–no longer seemed like an effective response. It seemed, in retrospect, to have been almost laughably naive. The situation didn’t even seem amenable to a conventional war. Something new would have to be invented, and fast. And it would have to be global. It would have to have great depth and breadth, and it would probably last for decades or even longer.

It’s long, and it’s hard. But fatigue is really not an option, although of course we all feel it. In the deceptively simple yet majestically eloquent words of that wily old leader, Winston Churchill, who knew what long hard struggles were all about, and who knew how to describe them:

This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.

[NOTE: I just wanted to add that the fatigue I’m writing about here is certainly not limited to the blogosphere, nor even to the so-called right. In an earlier (and longer) version of this post, I made that clear, but when I shortened the post it became much less clear.]